It has come to our attention that Chevrolet is off to a booming start this year in the United Kingdom, where it reportedly sold a total of one—yes, one—car last month. Notably, that’s one (1) more than its U.K. sales a year prior. Not bad!

One! What car? It’s hard to say. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which tracks new car registrations in the U.K., doesn’t break out exact models, but it has a handy chart that confirms, yep, one car sale in January for Chevy:

The increase of one (1) sale last month called to mind that hilarious story a few years back, when Chevrolet spent $600 million in a sponsorship deal for the English soccer team Manchester United. That, you might recall, didn’t go over too well:

Never mind that Chevrolet is basically a nonentity in Europe, and that promoting Chevy would clash with GM’s existing Opel and Vauxhall brands over there. According to a team survey, Manchester United’s fan base is 659 million people, nearly half of whom live in the Asia-Pacific region. That’s global exposure in a lot of markets that Chevy wants to plunder.

The deal proved to be Ewanick’s undoing, however, as some of the under-reported minutiae of the deal led to his being sacked. But the ink was dry. The Chevy badge was going to be on Man U jerseys starting in fall 2014 through 2021. The price tag was high, but it was worth it, right?

Advertisement

It wasn’t!

For an English club to qualify for next year’s lucrative Champions League against other elite European competition, it has to finish in the top four places in this year’s home competition. With the 2013-14 season coming into the home stretch, there are few signs that Man U will pull things together to pass Everton, Tottenham and Liverpool to reach fourth place. A lower finish puts Man U into the Europa League, known as the “poisoned chalice” of European football tournaments.

Not only do most established teams not care about this lesser tournament, neither do fans nor TV viewers. And instead of playing in marketing hotspots like Milan and Paris, Man U will instead be playing in forgotten wastelands like Tromsø, Dnipropetrovsk and Makhachkala. Yes, those are real places.